Good write up. Thanks for the good lessons learned section.

Tmux is your friend for running stuff disconnected. And I agree with the other post about btrfs send/receive.

They’ve been rock solid so far. Even through the initial sync from my old file server (pretty intensive network and disk usage for about 5 days straight). I’ve only been running them for about 3 months so far though, so time will tell. They are like most mini pc manufacturers with funny names though. I doubt I’ll ever get any sort of bios/uefi update

Internet:

• 1G fiber

Router:

• N100 with dual 2.5G nics

Lab:

• 3x N100 mini PCs as k8s control plane+ceph mon/mds/mgr
• 4x Aoostar R7 “NAS” systems (5700u/32G ram/20T rust/2T sata SSD/4T nvme) as ceph OSDs/k8s workers

Network:

• Hodge podge of switches I shouldn’t trust nearly as much as I do
• 3x 8 port 2.5G switches (1 with poe for APs)
• 1x 24 port 1G switch
• 2x omada APs

Software:

• All the standard stuff for media archival purposes
• Ceph for storage (using some manual tiering in cephfs)
• K8s for container orchestration (deployed via k0sctl)
• A handful of cloud-hypervisor VMs
• Most of the lab managed by some tooling I’ve written in go
• Alpine Linux for everything

All under 120w power usage